Women Development Fund (WODEF) mobilizes resources to empower grassroots feminist organizations and champion women’s and girls’ rights.
Rural Women Impact Investment & Financing
WODEF uses a donor-advised funding mechanism to build an ecosystem of women-led agribusinesses targeted to rebuild household livelihoods and strengthen their resilience against financial and climate shocks. We secure and channel financial and non-financial resources to rural women to establish, grow and strengthen small and micro enterprises (SMEs). Ensuring that financial resources are in the hands of women promotes economic growth and development.
WODEF also provides safe spaces for women to dialogue about economic justice and deepen their understanding of impact investment and financing.
Resource Mobilization and Local Grant Making
We work with national and international donor agencies to provide restricted and unrestricted funding to women’s groups and women-led organizations that are committed to promoting women’s empowerment and women’s rights. WODEF’s fundraising cycle focuses on identifying suitable funders and researching their funding process while ensuring that relationships are built and solicitation is only done with donors holding similar interests.
At WODEF, we work towards providing mission-aligned funding so as to empower organizations that focus on solving problems at the grassroots. WODEF hopes to fundraise with the aim of promoting social justice, protecting the most vulnerable, developing enterprises, and ultimately, seeing that there is impact and evidence of women’s empowerment.
Institutional & Capacity Development of Women Rights Organizations
We contribute financial and non-financial support such as capacity building training, mentorship, improvement of organization systems and governance, convening and connecting people, sharing of information and expertise, care, and solidarity.
We seek to strengthen systems and promote effective service delivery at the community level while ensuring that challenges associated with organizational systems and programming capacities are mitigated. Other than this, WODEF promotes professional development to ensure that teams remain competent in areas that are central to project design and implementation.
Coalition Building And Policy Advocacy
Our goal is to influence decision-makers in the funding ecosystem to develop, change and implement policies that promote the achievement of more and better resources for feminist organizations and women’s rights work.
WODEF’s advocacy efforts aim at affecting and realizing concrete and sustainable improvements in the lives of our target groups.
Climate Justice And Resilience
The WODEF climate change strategy focuses on supporting interventions that apply innovative approaches in mitigating direct climate impact on women and girls; and seeks to encourage climate adaptation livelihood initiatives e.g. climate smart agriculture to improve the quality of life among women and girls in impoverished societies.
Sexual & Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR)
The SRHR priority areas are based on supporting initiatives that accelerate access and uptake of services by women and girls through increasing access to information, contraceptives, supporting and strengthening of youth & women-friendly centers, and advocacy on SRHR and policy reforms.
WODEF seeks to support and strengthen all its Local Implementing Partners (LIPs) to increase awareness of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV), strengthen responses to prevent SGBV, including issues of defilement, rape, and Female Genital Mutilation (FGM); and promote gender equality across Kenya.
Prevention of Violence against Women and girls (VAWGs)
WODEF seeks to support initiatives or interventions addressing sexual harassment, defilement and rape cases, physical, emotional, and psychological violence against women and girls; Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), child marriages, and teenage pregnancies.
WODEF works with the Local Implementing Partners (LIPs) to promote short-term and long-term interventions to provide a medico-legal response, increase the level of community awareness, and lobby for policy reforms that favor women and girls to improve service delivery and access to services.
WODEF prioritizes transforming the formal institutions structures and systems which push women, girls, and children to the periphery, by injecting strategic and sustained advocacy pressure and challenging social systems and structures which undermine values, dignity, worth, and the potential of women and girls in the society.
We strongly believe that shifting power structures, norms, beliefs, and systems in favor of women, girls, and children’s rights is the foundation for building new synergies to allow meaningful participation of individual persons and contributes to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Empowering every woman, girl & child to be free
We are mobilizing resources to empower grassroots feminist organizations and champion women’s and girls’ rights